Disclaimer

Details

To convert the legacy NFS Gateway (Novell NFS 3.0 SP5+) "sys:/etc/imports" configuration file to the new format used by NFS Gateway 4.0 for NetWare 6.x. This PERL script is especially useful if you have a large number of UNIX-to-PC Gateway volumes (we have 90+) and you do not wish to re-create all of that configuration by hand.

By default, if this script is run from your current NFS 3.0 Gateway server console prompt, it will read in "sys:/etc/imports" and output to a new "sys:/gy4-volumes.ncf" file. You can then copy the contents of this output and paste it into "sys:/system/gystart.ncf" at the very bottom of the file, or simply load this new gy4-volumes.ncf batch file separately in the AUTOEXEC.NCF (after the load line for gystart.ncf itself). The "sys:/system/gystart.ncf" is created by the NFS Gateway 4.0 installation routines, and it is what starts-up the NFS Gateway services and sets up global parameters.

Special note: Novell now recommends referring to UNIX hosts by their IP Address to avoid a performance setback. So, this script will attempt to dynamically look-up any DNS hostnames you may have used in the past. Existing use of IP addresses or unknown DNS names will be preserved.

Also, certain fields used in the NFS 3.0 Gateway "imports" configuration file are no longer relevant in NFS Gateway 4.0. Specifically "nfsPacketXferSize" and "Mount Volume On Startup" fields have no meaning in an NFS 4.0 volume mount (GYMOUNT) syntax. For nfsPacketXferSize (a.k.a. NFS Packet Transfer Size), that is now handled globally by the "Largest UDP Packet Size" console SET parameter. And as far as the "Mount Volume On Startup" field is concerned, since GYMOUNT commands are all dumped individually into an NCF batch file, there's no point to even including a particular volume command if you don't intend to mount it upon NFS Gateway start-up.

Additionally, some fields that continue to exist in NFS Gateway 4.0 have new system defaults -- RPC Inter Packet Timeout and RPC Retry Count. The two, mutually exclusive command line options for this script account for this reality by giving you the option 1) to blindly recreate your NFS 3.0 "imports" file into the new GYMOUNT syntax and effectively keeping the old timeout/retry values (-o), or 2) throw away the old system defaults used by NFS 3.0 in favor of the new system default values (-n) while preserving other settings found.

See the '#'-commented sections at the top of the script source code for more background and usage detail.